How can marketers satisfy this unquenchable desire for new content? One technology that helps tackle the need for developing and delivering a constant stream of personalized content to customers is natural language generation (NLG).

April 2011 Issue

News Features

Last spring, Google found itself on the receiving end of a fair amount of consternation from the technology press, privacy advocates, and several European countries. German officials accused the search giant of using its ubiquitous Street View cars to do more than merely snap those unsettling panoramic shots of your house and neighborhood. Those official Google vehicles were also collecting "samples of payload data from WiFi networks," Google admitted in April on its official blog, in response to the accusation.

Everyone in the content business knows that mobile use is on the rise, and many content providers are rushing to move their content to applications. Earlier this year, Apple announced the 10 billionth download in the App Store, and the 2-year-old Android Market already offers more than 100,000 apps for download.

Featured Stories

People often take for granted the notion that content comes bundled with an inherent value. It's an easy mistake to make, especially with so much digital content available instantly with a price tag helpfully affixed for immediate purchase and consumption. All content experiences are not created equal, however, and that experience can make a world of difference in how valuable content is for a user. Even excellent content can be dragged down by a poor user experience that prevents users from easily finding and engaging with the content they need. With user expectations rising steadily, that failure to engage can translate into poor site ROI and even a major impact on a company's brand.

The content strategies of old media outlets are getting a complete overhaul: undergoing a little nip here and a tuck thereto meet users' expectations for instantaneous, scalable delivery to the devices and platforms of their choosing while stillproviding content worth viewing. Some companies find themselves stuck between old and new media silos, but according to Ron Miller, a freelance journalist covering the technology and media industries, the real solution lies in picking the best from both worlds--thoughtfully adapted content that provides additional context through new media devices and applications to create an innovative user experience.

Columns

For years, I've been saying that to create great marketing content for company websites or social networks, you need to think one thing: Nobody cares about my products and services except for me and others in my organization. What your buyers care about is themselves. Make no mistake, your potential customers care a great deal about solving their problems and are always on the lookout for a company that can help them do so.

I've been reserving comment on The Daily - the world's first daily newspaper for tablets, brought to you by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp. - because I am having trouble truly deciding what I think about it. As a technology journalist, the concept fascinates me. The iPad was, after all, said to be the publishing industry's savior. As a reader, though, I wasn't all that interested.

If you're an investor, you should know about publishing's dirty little secret. Most book publishers are wasting your money. That's right: They're burning through your cash at an alarming rate in a desperate attempt to keep up with changing user expectations. Publishers are throwing your money at problems that can only really be fixed by changing the way the publishing process works.

Commentary from Martin White: About 50 years ago I fell in love with chemistry. I could think of no more interesting subject and spent 3 very enjoyable years at the University of Southampton. It was a time when the department was home to some exceedingly able researchers, and when I crept into the research meetings I heard phrases such as, "We are beginning to think ..." and "It's starting to look as though ..." as new techniques were being developed just down the corridor in the undergraduate labs.

I couldn't function without it, but email is becoming dysfunctional and showing its age. In 1998, I had two email accounts, one business (using Microsoft Outlook) and one personal, available only via dial-up service. As time passed, the quantity of my email accounts grew, as did the type of email servers and email providers. Times have changed, and not for the better.

Case Studies

By 2008, Brooklyn Law School was working with a website that was about 8 years old and served the school's internal and external audiences. The outdated site was becoming insufficient as high volumes of prospective students turned to the internet for information on colleges and universities. The school found that many users had to click up to seven times on links from the homepage to find what they were looking for. There was also an issue of content redundancy. However, in order to create a more dynamic site, staff members needed a service that could integrate with their existing databases.